A weak utopianism of postcolonial nationalist Bildung: Re-reading Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born

Abstract

Most criticism of Ayi Kwei Armah’s 1968 novel The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born has concentrated on the pessimistic aspects of the text, highlighting the failures of postcolonial nationalist movements, and ranking Armah’s work “among the bleakest and most disenabling texts to be produced during the first decade of independence in Africa” (Lazarus, “(Re)turn to the People” in The World of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, ed. Charles Cantalupo [Trenton, NJ: African World, 1995]). This article contests such readings and works towards the recovery of a latent, weak utopianism that works similarly to Derrida’s conception of messianicity without messianism and the promise for the event yet to-come. Instead of viewing the novel as an historical account of the failures of postcolonial nationalism, this weak-utopian reading privileges the promise and possibility that arise from the text itself. Thus the article underscores the need for a negative dialectical or weak-utopian politics, recognizing, in Adorno’s words, the “consciousness of non-identity, or, more accurately [ … ], the creation of a reconciled non-identity” (55).

Keywords:

• Ayi Kwei Armah
• postcolonial nationalism
• utopianism
• messianicity without messianism
• postcolonial Bildung
• negative dialectics

Notes

1. Elsewhere, Lazarus describes Armah’s postcolonial writings generally as being “for all their militancy, among the bleakest and most disenabling texts to be produced during the first decade of independence in Africa” (“(Re)turn” 14). On the novel’s deep abiding pessimism, see also Amuta, Kibera and Nnolim, among many others.

2. See Jameson (Archaeologies 288–89) as well as Marcuse. Although Jameson is referring specifically to contemporary science fiction in this particular instance, the importance of the utopian impulse, as well as its waning, is a hallmark of his work on the culture and politics of the late capitalist period in general. Short of any precise definition, the Marcusian utopian impulse can best be summed up by the following:[ … ] a work of art can be called revolutionary if, by virtue of the aesthetic transformation, it represents, in the exemplary fate of individuals, the prevailing unfreedom and the rebelling forces, thus breaking through the mystified (and petrified) social reality, and opening the horizon of change (liberation). (Marcuse xi, my emphasis)

3. I fully intend this use of “weak-utopian impulse” to have a family resemblance with Gautam Premnath’s “weak sovereignty” – with both, then, drawing implicitly on Benjamin’s “weak messianism” from “On the Concept of History” (or what in an earlier English translation is entitled “Theses on History”).

4. See Booker for a different interpretation of the Utopian character and possibility for Armah’s work in general.